Sinn Féin's chief negotiator Martin McGuinness has dismissed as "a load of hooey" a claim in a Sunday newspaper that he was a British agent.
He said yesterday he was one "million per cent certain" that no evidence would emerge to support the report in the Sunday World that he worked for MI6 while operating at the head of the provisional republican movement.
Mr McGuinness claimed the DUP was behind the allegations that he was a British spy. In the House of Commons on February 8th, DUP MP William McCrea intervened while DUP deputy leader Peter Robinson was commenting on alleged IRA criminality to ask: "Will he [ Mr Robinson] ask the Secretary of State to look into the suggestion that one of the leading members of the IRA and the army council, Martin McGuinness, has been a paid British agent for a long time?"
The DUP insisted yesterday it had nothing to do with the Sunday World report, which quoted a former British army agent handler, who uses the pseudonym Martin Ingram and who worked for the army's undercover Force Research Unit (FRU).
Ingram was one of the central figures in exposing IRA senior member Freddie Scappaticci as the British agent known as Stakeknife.
The paper published a transcript of a conversation between a figure called J118, who Ingram says is McGuinness, and his alleged handler, "G". The short discussion is not specific but Ingram said it referred to the launch of the IRA's 1990 "human bomb" campaign
This included the murder of Patsy Gillespie who was forced to drive a car bomb to a British army checkpoint at Coshquin in Derry near the Donegal border. The bomb was triggered while Mr Gillespie was in the vehicle, killing him and five British soldiers.
Were Ingram's interpretation of the conversation correct, it would mean that not only was Mr McGuinness a spy but that British intelligence colluded with the IRA's human bomb campaign and allowed Mr McGuinness free range to act as an IRA leader.
Senior security and British political sources dismissed the allegation. Mr McGuinness, in making his first public comments on the matter, said the report could be summarised in four words - "a load of hooey".
"I have been aware - and I know some journalists have been aware - for some time that elements of the DUP are the people behind this story."
He also referred to Mr McCrea's comments in the House of Commons. Such elements were trying to "undermine the prospects" of striking a political deal between the DUP and Sinn Féin to restore devolution. The republican constituency was intelligent and would see through this strategy.
The report possibly could be stood up if a tape of the conversation allegedly between Mr McGuinness and his handler were to surface. Mr McGuinness however said there was "not even a remote possibility" of anything emerging to substantiate the claims.
His voice quivering with some emotion, he added: "I am a thousand, I am a million per cent confident no one will ever produce anything against me . . . Under no circumstances will I ever be concerned about anybody throwing anything up at me which will strike against me."
DUP MP Gregory Campbell said: "We had nothing to do with these allegations . . . they are something for Sinn Féin to deal with."